Saturday, January 30, 2016

La Glace à Trois Faces (The Three-Sided Mirror, Jean Epstein 1927)

I watched
this remarkable 1927 Jean Epstein silent film to learn something about French
Impressionism, an avant-garde film movement that developed in France in the
1920s and had great influence on later European cinema. I tried to look at it
with humility and curiosity, but without letting its stature as a Highly
Significant Silent Movie interfere in any way with my enjoyment of it.

What struck me most was the wide variety of techniques employed, which I will
attempt to illustrate in the following, and by the attention to eyes and gazes.
A scene at a park focusing on the interplay of looks between two love rivals
and the woman they compete for had me totally spellbound. Eyes are also essential
to immerse the viewer into the characters' psychology, which is the main focus
of most Impressionist films.

Plot.

It's the
story of a sophisticated and haughty middle-aged man who successively seduces
three women with his affected manners and dandyish attitude, only to abandon
each of them a few days (possibly hours) later for what seem futile reasons.
The film's structure is tripartite with an epilogue.

Segment 1
follows Pearl, a stylish and distinguished woman who recounts to a casual
passerby the story of her affair with the aforementioned man a few moments
after having been dumped by him. Memories and reality blend as she tries to
make sense of what happened. A flashback shows their first encounter and the
various phases of their brief relationship. At the end of the segment, the man
is shown driving his sportscar, happy to be free again.

Segment 2
features Athalia, an aristocratic sculptress of Russian origin. During an exhibition
of her own works at her sumptuous house she gradually realizes that her recently
acquired fiancé is not going to show up as he had promised. Trying to figure
what went wrong with him, Athalia tells a friend about the best and worst moments
of their engagement. When her tale is over, again we see the man setting off
for new adventures.

In segment
3, working-class girl Lucie abandons herself to recollections of her liaison with
that same man. In their happiest days they are going boating and enjoying a
local festival. In the worst ones, he is reproaching her for her uncultivated
manners and teaching her the proper way to hold a cup of tea.

If by now
we have seen the unnamed man through the eyes of the three women, now an
epilogue simply titled "lui" ("him" in French) follows him
alone as he writes a goodbye letter to Lucie before attending a festival at a
small town in the French countryside. Once again behind the wheel, however, he suffers
a fatal accident caused by a Hitchcock-esque bird attack. In the brink of death,
a title card explains, the man finally realizes that he is a mystery to
himself, each version of him contradicting the other. In a last enigmatic shot,
he walks toward a symbolism-laden triple mirror before mysteriously vanishing.

Structure.

The first
three segments of the film bear evident parallelisms. All three are
introduced by two non-consecutive title cards, the first marked by a
progressive number (1, 2, 3) and the second carrying the name of the female
protagonist ("Pearl", "Mademoiselle Athalia Roubinowitch,
sculpteur" and "Lucie", respectively). The narrative structure
of each segment is roughly the same: The woman in question, recently separated
from her lover, tells the story of her liaison to a random listener, who can
either be a passerby (Pearl), friend (Athalia), or colleague (Lucie). This tale
unfolds as a flashback showing the lovers' meet-cute, their happiest moments
together and subsequent break-up. Every time, our unnamed male character is
shown writing a letter of excuse to the woman in question for not meeting her, before driving
off furiously in his sportscar.

The last segment stands on its own, the letter to Lucie providing a bridge with the
previous one. For most of the time we don't have access to his thoughts: a
hard-shelled man who doesn't abandon himself to nostalgic memories, he is now
enjoying the present moment, free from the complications of love. The final
scene disintegrates this illusory unity: as he lies dying on the grass, a
series of superimpositions expresses his confused psychological state as he tries in
vain to gather the pieces of his shattered mind. The final intertitle, taken
straight from Paul Morand's short story "La Glace à Trois Faces" which
the film is based on, confirms this interpretation, while the final
disappearance scene provides a sort of posthumous commentary on his fractured
personality.

While most
Impressionist films experimented considerably with camera techniques, but on the
other hand displayed fairly conventional narratives, Epstein's film weaves
instead a fiercely experimental multiple-narrator structure with one
character serving as a red thread between sections. The theme of the disintegration
of the self is in tune with some of the literary tendencies of the time. A
classic example, and here is my Italian background speaking, is Luigi Pirandello's novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, published in 1926 ‒ one year before the release of Epstein's film.

And
speaking of daring narrative structures, interestingly a French critic of the
time complained that the plot was almost unintelligible:

It's Jean
Epstein who makes a three-sided mirror where the technical frills don't quite
manage to hide the real vacuity. The story adapted from Paul Morand's book is
completely evaded, to such an extent that removing three or four intertitles
would be enough to make the main theme completely unintelligible.

As in most Impressionist films, the characters'
psychological traits are the plot's driving force, and great efforts are put by
filmmakers to express thoughts, memories, dreams in the most effective and visually
provocative ways. Which techniques are employed then, and according to which
criteria?

On my first
viewing I was mislead into thinking that Epstein, in trying to convey the
characters' subjectivity, employed a wide variety of techniques freely, with simple
cuts, cuts with dissolves and superimpositions appearing on screen without
following any particular logic. It was only after a more attentive viewing that
I began to notice how consistently they are employed throughout the film.
Epstein actually follows by and large two simple rules:

Simple
cuts, i.e. without superimpositions, generally signal a transition from
objective to subjective realms, or vice versa. They can be
occasionally accompanied by an iris (i.e. a moving circular mask placed over the camera), dissolve to black or other optical
device, but the two realms don't overlap. This is what happens with flashbacks. For example, Epstein cuts from Pearl crying in the park (objective) to her
first meeting with her lover, clearly a product of her imagination
(subjective).

Once
inside a character's mind, instead, the typically erratic flow of thoughts,
memories and dreams is rendered through superimposition, so that
events occurring in different places at different times coexist in the same
shot. At least this is what I have observed as a general rule, with a few
exceptions I shall discuss later.

Flashforwards
are handled just like flashbacks. A recurring situation has our heart-throb
looking in delight at an undefined point offscreen daydreaming about regaining
his freedom, before a cut to the next shot prophetically shows a flock of birds
perched on a power line, omen of his forthcoming death. (In fact, almost every transition from objective to
subjective begins and ends with a close-up of the character who is thinking, like
brackets enclosing his or her thoughts. This makes potentially confusing passages much
easier to follow.)

Dissolves are sometimes used for smooth transitions between two
different shots presenting the same scene from different vantage points or at
different times. For example, every time the man writes a letter we don't see
the whole writing process, but only the beginning and ending of it connected by a dissolve:

The same
happens when Pearl is fantasizing about his ex-fiancé's new romantic adventures,
as the figure of an unknown man with a monocle flirting with two attractive
ladies becomes, in Pearl's imagination, her ex-lover in company of two imaginary
women. Again, a dissolve skips over part of the scene:

In both
cases above an ellipsis is achieved using a fixed camera. Other times the
situation is reversed ‒ time flows uninterruptedly while the camera shifts position. Consider the axial cut with dissolve below, where the man is lighting
Athalia's cigarette:

In the next
example, the camera slowly moves toward the telephone in both shots, effectively
conveying the information that the telephone is ringing with no need for any
"RIIING!" intertitle. Again, time is (presumably) continuous while
space is not:

Even if not
strictly necessary from a narrative point of view, especially when time appears
continuous as in the cigarette lighting scene, these devices insist on the notion
that what we are seeing is filtered through some character's eyes and mind. I
was reminded of a scene at the beginning of Mulholland Drive where a limousine driving slowly along a desert road at night is presented
through a series of dissolves, with no other purpose than to establish the
film's dreamlike tone.

Editing in
The Three-Sided Mirror can be very fast at times. In segment
3 a rapid succession of shots of different lengths punctuated by all-white
frames conveys Lucie's frustration and sense of impotence. A similarly frenetic
montage reappears at the end: intertwined shots of warning traffic signs, the
man's contracted face, and the car speeding through peaceful villages almost mowing down innocent passersby, create a taut visual rhythm that
culminates in the final deadly accident.

Parallel
editing, aka cross-cutting, is also employed. For example, in the first episode
Epstein cross-cuts between Pearl crying, and her lover writing a letter before driving away. However, audiences in the late 1920s were already accustomed to
this technique, developed and refined in Hollywood already in the 1910s
(Griffith famously used cross-cutting in The Birth of a
Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916) and other
works).

Locations.

As in most Impressionist films, location shooting is predominant. Segment 4
almost borders on the documentary, with a rather lengthy portion (if compared
to the film's 40-minutes running time) showing a traditional celebration in a
small French village. Actually, at times the camera seems to forget that
"lui" is the protagonist, preferring instead to film people participating
in the rituals of the celebration. A precise geographical clue is given by one
of the community band's members, who holds a drum with the words "Fanfare
d'Ivry-Le-Temple" written on it (Ivry-Le-Temple is a small commune in the
Oise department in northern France).

A certain
attention is also paid to the characters' social milieu. Locales, clothes,
demeanors, and names suggest that Pearl and Athalia are wealthy
middle-to-upper-class women, while Lucie, with her manual job and lack of
etiquette, is clearly a working-class girl. The man, with his sportscar and refined,
effeminate manners, is probably some kind of aristocrat. The characters' varied
social backgrounds emphasize even more the impossibility to form a coherent
picture of the protagonist, who seems incapable of establishing durable
relationships with women regardless of their social position.

Making the
rules, breaking them.

If it's true that the film's structure follows a fairly
regular pattern, on the other hand Epstein cannot resist the temptation to introduce
here and there an occasional variation to the rules. For example, the letter to
Lucie, as well as the man's car ride, don't appear at the end of the third
segment as one would expect from what came before, but are delayed to the
beginning of the fourth. The purpose, I think, is to provide a temporal link
between segments 1, 2, 3 and the "lui" segment, suggesting that the
order in which the four segments are presented is chronological. One would be
hard-pressed, however, to situate spatially and temporally the final puzzling
shot of the man disappearing in front of the mirror, especially considering
that we have seen him agonizing a few seconds before.

Obsessive viewers
will also have noticed that segments 1 and 3 introduce the main female
character by her first name only, while in the second we are given her full
name, title and profession: "Mademoiselle Athalia Roubinowitch,
sculpteur".

But the most
daring violations of the norms concern optical devices. As we have seen,
superimpositions are usually employed to convey subjectivity, while
objective/subjective transitions (usually involving flashbacks or flashforwards)
are signaled by simple cuts sometimes connected by dissolves to black. And yet
at the end of the third segment the transition from Lucie's memories of an
event she attended with her fiancé to a scene situated in the present at her
workplace is obtained through a "graphic cut" that briefly
superimposes two shots. Note the rough match between the broken cup in the
first shot and the vase in the second, both objects placed in the lower right
quadrant of the frame:

I guess
Epstein knew that he could allow himself to infringe the rules a bit at this
point, because by now the viewer should have more or less assimilated the
general principles governing flashbacks, flashforwards and subjectivity.
However, he makes sure to provide all the necessary information so that we can clearly
determine where we are: two very different locales and situations
(countryside/amusement vs. city/work routine) and an object (the vase) anchored
in the present appearing both before and after the flashback.

Vice versa,
in segment 3 we find a montage sequence punctuated by cuts that express Lucie's
contrasting emotions. However, these cuts differ from those we have seen
earlier in that they are connected by all-white shots possibly lasting 1-2
frames (below I've only included one as an example). The uneven duration of the
shots together with the rapid succession of disparate situations on display conjure
up an insistent rhythm that couldn't be achieved through superimposition:

With the
due distinctions, I was reminded of a similar sequence in (500) Days
Of Summer, where a flashback montage of the lowest points of Tom and
Summer's story expresses Tom's effort to process the end of their relationship.

Another
minor variation occurs in segment 2, where a cut from Athalia's living room to
the wood where she first met "him" is preceded by an iris closing on Athalia.

The
sequence in the wood is perhaps the most confusing. Even on my second viewing I
struggled to understand who the hell the monocle-man and the toothpick-man were.
Here reality and fantasy overlap in a disorienting way, not least because we
have not seen those two characters before, thus it is not immediately clear
that they are simple passersby whose vague resemblance to "him" ignites
Pearl's imagination.

While not always
successful in terms of intelligibility, all these techniques seem to me
evidence of an extraordinary experimental fervor that, Godard-like,
creates a new language and at the same time calls it into question by offering
bold alternatives.

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"Every encounter between a man and a woman starts off as if it were the first such meeting on earth. As if there haven't already been billions of such encounters since the time of Adam and Eve. You see, experience in love is nontransferable. This is a great misfortune. And a great piece of luck."